A few weeks later, actively procrastinating, I want to fix the laptop status LED at the bottom of the LCD. I found out it was probably the LCD cable, which doubles as LED driver, that might be partially failing. Having a x61 with a bricked motherboard on a shelf, I want to see if I can leverage its LCD cable, in the case it's compatible, which I don't know.
Reaching for this cable costs time since it requires to disassemble almost everything, but I'm going for it. I start with the x61 LCD block. Then remove the keyboard on my x60s to access the LCD cable socket on the motherboard. At that point I'm only testing compatibility on this side of the cable. I boot the x60s and the LCD works fine (it's badly shattered on 30% of the surface, but the panel is ok everywhere else, so I'm able to see the BIOS splash screen). #cool
Now I have to dismantle the panel from the lid etc etc, on both laptops. Only when everything is in pieces I realize, the cables are electrically compatible, meaning both sides are the same sockets and wires. But. But... the LCD panels are build upside down. One has the controller circuit at the bottom, the other at the top. The cables are built specifically for one kind, no way to stretch or fold it back, it's too short. #fail
Time to rollback. I rewire the old panel, ~difficultly. Plug cables and power supply, not the case screws since time taught me to screw things only after testing. No backlight on the LCD. I can see shades meaning pixels are drawn but no light. I unplugged the inverter cable a bit (with free scary static noise) while installing it in the lid. Easy to fix. 2nd boot, now the backlight works fine, so fine I can see a ~10pixel wide black band in the middle. It's regular and small so I try to poke around to see if the cable is not seated properly. No luck. I discover that below the LCD are running to very thin, very dense cables called 'tab bonds' which are the final panel data feeders. Indeed, fiddling with them fix the fringe of the black band, but it's not stable.
some links:
http://www.justanswer.com/tv-repair/73km2-2008-toshiba-lcd-v52xv545u-need-repair-when.html
http://www.badcaps.net/forum/showthread.php?t=25371
http://blog.stuffedcow.net/2012/03/thinkpad-x61-tablet-lcd-bubbles/
http://vimeo.com/3933798
The laptop works fine but that weird strip is too distracting. And that laptop was a little too slow, and 1.5GB of RAM too short. I have that other x61 c2d/4GB lying around. Let's retire the x60s, even though I love this little crippled bastard, he took everything I through at him. #soldier.
I plug the ssd in the x61, boot my old 32bit system. But I wanna try 64bit, because I don't like only having access to 3GB when there are 4. Also I noticed that software behaved a little differently in 64bit, so I format / reinstall everything.
To try things early I dont install xmonad/haskell, only wmii. It's a very small and ~limited window manager. But I realize it does what xmonad did, and the basic paradigm of stacked window titles is very easy on my mind. Much easier than the 2d split of xmonad (surely xmonad can emulate wmii but I'm not in the mood for writing haskell #noob).
So that's a first. I'm not missing xmonad in the slightest for my usage.
I also tried fish. I may not program in it, but it's light and ergonomically heaven compared to bash and even zsh.
Final note:
- arch
- base-devel (gcc, make...)
- python3, guile ...
- emacs
- chromium
- alsa, cmus, mpv
2.5GB (including pacman and chromium caches, so more ~2GB).
Pretty slick.
